So I finally got to the chemistry stockroom for some supplies, and picked up our bottle of HCl from the MPRL. I thought about working in the “Metallography Prep Lab” that this building has, inasmuch as I was going to do some metallography, but like so many of the facilities here, that lab sucks. The fume hood has 18″ high doors that slide open side to side, rather than one solid door that pulls down — the preferred feature for working with really nasty things (that way you only lose your hands). The “sink” is a 6″ oval directly below the water faucet (don’t plan on rinsing a 500 mL beaker in there). There’s no shelf for reagents. There’s no air gun. The lighting sucks.

Sad when you actually miss Honeywell (although it sucks to be them).

So anyway, Matt and I decided to get to work in his lab — also an imperfect solution, since much of the work that goes on in his lab involves powder metallurgy and ceramic slurries, so there’s not a clean surface in sight.

Hydrogen peroxide is clear. Hydrochloric acid is clear. (The hydrogen peroxide that you’re used to, incidentally, is only 3% solution. 30% peroxide will burn the crap out of you.) So anyway, after carefully testing the addition of peroxide to HCl (to make sure it wasn’t going to blow up — it just bubbled a little), we added the rest of the peroxide to the acid (at about a 1:10 ratio…yeah, strong). It bubbled a bit, but seemed pretty stable. “Should we stir it?” I asked, and handed Matt a glass rod. “I guess.” At that point the beaker became an almost-roiling concoction that turned a sickly pee-pee yellow and bubbled on its own for quite some time.

When the fear of explosion was gone, we swabbed some onto the nickel-base superalloy for a few seconds and rinsed.

Nothing.

“Try 20 seconds.” Okay, so I dip a fresh swab, rub it on the polished metal, dipped some more and rubbed some more….

A third try for a good minute did about as little. You could kinda tell where we had etched, but you couldn’t see anything.

Many minutes at the microscope have me thinking I can see enough reflectivity change in a somewhat-columnar pattern to guess a dendrite spacing, but I just can’t tell. If I didn’t have to get to happy hour, I might just go try straight HCl on the thing. But come on, 90% HCl with peroxide?

This is some strong nickel-base shit.

All your nickel-base are belong to us!



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